Headlines of the day: It’s sorta like gilding a turd

Challenged on falsehoods, adviser says Trump team has ‘alternative facts’

President Trump’s aides are under fire after his press secretary made easily disproved claims about the size of the inauguration crowd. Chief counselor Kellyanne Conway sparred on “Meet the Press” with Chuck Todd who said, “Alternative facts are not facts.”

And some reaction to all that infantile umbrage from the New York Times:

Even Top Aides Are Troubled by Trump’s Rocky First Weekend

President Trump spent his first two days in office lashing out about crowd sizes and rewriting the history of his dealings with intelligence agencies.

His lack of focus, at a time when a new president can maximize his leverage, frustrated some senior members of his circle who had urged him to move on.

And as for that crowd size, where Donald Trump claimed the largest crowd ever to witness a presidential inauguration and said he personally “saw” between one and one-and-a-half million people standing before him when he spoke. a side by-side comparison of crows at the first Obama inauguration [right] and Saturday’s swearing-in [left] tell a vastly different tale. From the Independent:

And there was an even bigger turnout for another event in Washington that dwarfed the Trump throngette, reported the New York Times:

The women’s march in Washington was roughly three times the size of the audience at President Trump’s inauguration, crowd counting experts said Saturday.

Marcel Altenburg and Keith Still, crowd scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University in Britain, analyzed photographs and video taken of the National Mall and vicinity and estimated that there were about 160,000 people in those areas in the hour leading up to Mr. Trump’s speech Friday.

They estimated that at least 470,000 people were at the women’s march in Washington in the areas on and near the mall at about 2 p.m. Saturday.

UPDATE: And, of course, Trump tweeted his own response for the anti-inaugural protests [and we feature one response as well]:

After the National Park Service retweeted messages that negatively compared the crowd sizes at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration to Donald Trump’s inauguration Friday, representatives from the new administration asked the Interior Department’s digital team to temporarily stop using Twitter — a decision the agency now claims was out of a concern the account was hacked.

The National Park Service Twitter account retweeted this observation from New York Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum on Friday: “Compare the crowds: 2009 inauguration at left, 2017 inauguration at right.” The tweet contained images from both events showing an apparent difference in crowd size. The retweet has since been deleted.

After the retweet began to get attention, a career staffer at the Interior Department instructed employees that the “new administration has said that the department and all bureau are not supposed to tweet this weekend and wait for guidance until Monday.”

The message continued, “Please make sure that any scheduled tweets are no longer scheduled,” and referred all questions to another career staffer at the department.

On Saturday, the National Park Service called Friday’s retweets “mistaken.”

UPDATE III: We just spotted this from the editorial cartoonist of the Los Angeles Times: